In Kentucky’s crushing home loss to Florida, John Calipari made a number of dubious choices.

In Kentucky’s crushing home loss to Florida, John Calipari made a number of dubious choices.

LEXINGTON: Position No. 10 The blame for Kentucky’s devastating 94-91 overtime loss against the Florida Gators on Wednesday rests mostly with head coach John Calipari.

The main cause of the UK’s defeat was yet another terrible defensive performance on the opening night.

Florida made 12 of 28 (32.9%) three-pointers, with Walter Clayton Jr., an Iona transfer, nailing seven of them. In Florida’s two games this season versus the Wildcats, Clayton Jr. scored 23 points. Thus, his big-time night looks to have been avoidable, whether it was a failure in the scouting report or a lack of execution.

“They’re a little young,” Clayton remarked following the game. “They were jumping out at a lot of pump fakes from me.”

While some individual errors cannot entirely be attributed on Calipari, the head coach bears some of the blame for the defensive misfortunes of the team, which had UK ranked 288th in the nation coming into Wednesday’s game and allowing 76.3 points per game.

In Kentucky’s crushing home loss to Florida, John Calipari made a number of dubious choices.

And then there were the poor coaching decisions.

Rob Dillingham made a free throw in less than 13 seconds to put UK ahead 84-81. Instead of calling a timeout to set up his defense after Dillingham’s free throw, Calipari chose to leave the second one uninterpreted.

“I thought about calling a timeout before his second free throw and then I’m like, I’ll freeze the kid,” Calipari stated. “Allow him to fire. He’ll succeed.”

The lead was reduced to three points after Dillingham missed the free throw.

With a three-point lead, UK had the option to foul right away or before the Gators could try a three-point shot, forcing Florida to foul and possibly preventing a game-winning three-point shot.

Kentucky is just 2-3 versus Quad 1 opponents, has dropped its previous two games, has suffered two home losses to unranked teams, has already lost two games in the Quad 2 (Florida) and has already had one Quad 3 (UNC Wilmington) loss on its NCAA Tournament record.

If its record remains consistent, it puts UK as a No. 5 or No. 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

If a team with perhaps as many as seven NBA Draft picks were to miss the NCAA Tournament and fail to advance past the second weekend, Calipari would have to put his incredibly talented roster back on track in order to avert the greatest coaching collapse of his time in the UK.

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